Purchasing and Finance

Objectives

The Accounts Payable department asked the Transformation Programme to facilitate an event looking at the payment of invoices for bank and locum staff. We invited staff from the accounts payable and staffing solutions team to come together to understand the current process and identify the bottlenecks.

Outputs from the Lean Event

The team spent a couple of hours documenting the current state and concluded that it could take (worst case scenario) 17 weeks to process an invoice. All agreed that this was too long as the Trust could receive interest penalties if the invoice isn't paid within 30 days. The current state is attached below (first two pages).

The group then brain stormed ideas on how the process could be improved and from this they agreed that there were 7 quick wins which would reduce the time by 5 weeks. The changes included reducing the number of checks by team leaders and reducing the number of handoffs (steps in the process). Page 3 of the document above details the new process with the quick wins implemented.

The team now have an action plan to take the changes forward which is being owned by Helen Bostock and team. Action plan below.